Fairies

En Francais

I've been doing research for a while now about fairy traditions. Most of what I've found has been from the British Isles or Brittany. Unfortunately, we will probably never know very much about the pre-Christian faiths in the Isles.

The following themes seem common throughout the various regions, however;

• Fairies live underground or under water. The Irish Daoine Sidhe are from the hollow hills. In Wales, the Taliesin tale tells of an underground Fairyland. In Scotland, the fairyland is located under hills, and near the full moon the tops rise on pillars, and passers by may be able to see inside their dwellings.
  Fairies are associated, in various areas, with both barrows (burial mounds) and natural, very green hills.
  Sometimes, fairies also come from out of the water, and in some places it is believed that you can see their cities under the waves. Others live on islands which are invisible from the shores. (Perhaps Avalon)

• Fairies generally wear green or white clothes, with red sashes and hats being fashionable with them. Occasionally, they are dressed in ragged grey clothing, however. They tend to wear "old-fashioned" clothes.

• Fairies like to steal human children, and replace them with their own, hairy children or with an older fairy who pretends to be the infant. The babies so stolen are well looked after, and may sometimes escape after 14 years. Yeats' poem, Stolen Child, suggests that they do this out of kindness "for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand", but there are other suggestions that fairies have a hard time reproducing, and need human children to replenish their numbers. Sometimes they steal human mothers as well, using them as nursemaids for their own children. Many children who failed to thrive and develop normally were taken for fairy changelings, which may have been the origin of these stories.

• Time passes differently in Fairyland. Most people who spend time with the fairies feel that a few hours or days have passed, but when they come back, it may be that years or even centuries have gone by.

• Fairies love music and dancing. They could often be seen, in times past, dancing in fairy rings (mushroom rings) or around bonfires. Anyone who joined the dancing was likely to be caught up in it and unable to leave until the music stopped or someone pulled them out. They would often, when rescued, be surprised to hear that they had been dancing all night.

Plants and Fairies

Banshee

House Spirits

Elemental/Nature Fairies